The "Agile Port" System (Port / Inland Rail Terminal Cluster)

For many container ports, increasing throughput and thus terminal productivity has become a challenge, particularly in light of larger containerships placing pressures on port operations around a specific time slot. Thus, the capacity problem may not be in absolute terms, but in terms of throughput. The conventional strategy mainly involved the expansion of terminal facilities and the purchase of more efficient intermodal equipment, such as portainers. In many cases, lateral expansion is no longer an option and the amount of truck traffic servicing the terminal is such that significant delays are experienced at the gate and on local access routes. A better maritime / land interface appears to be a important step in the improvement of the throughput, speed and efficiency of port terminals.

The "Agile Port" concept aims at linking directly through a dedicated rail corridor on-dock rail facilities to a nearby inland rail terminal where containers can be sorted by destination. On one side, the maritime terminal increases its throughout, in theory up to 40%, without additional land, while on the other side, a nearby inland rail terminal facing less land pressures is used to sort containerized shipments to their respective inland destinations. A share of the cargo storage and sorting aspect of terminal operations is consequently moved inland where there is more land available and road terminal access is less problematic. This involves two major modes of operation for the on-dock rail terminal:

Block Swap. Full-length trains are assembled at the on-dock facility, consisting of blocks of 10 container cars each sorted for specific inland destinations. At the inland facility, these blocks are then sorted with blocks from other trains to create destination-specific unit trains. The drawback of the approach is that it would require a large rail yard (both at the port and inland terminals) and a lot of shunting in addition to having the block cars spending more time at the on-dock facility while they are assembled.
'No Sort' Shuttle Trains. Unsorted full-length trains are assembled at the on-dock rail terminal. All sorting of containers into destination-specific unit trains is performed at the inland facility. It requires the container to be offloaded from the inland facility to other destination specific trains and also requires additional warehousing space. The 'No Sort' approach could be the most effective dock-wise in terms of throughput and would require transmodal operations at the inland rail facility.

In such a setting, the inland rail terminal becomes a particularly important component of the system as its role becomes increasingly focused on transmodal (rail to rail) operations. Transloading operations should not be neglected, particularly in the North American setting. A maritime container can be picked up at the port terminal and trucked to a distribution center in the vicinity of the inland rail terminal. At the distribution center, the contents of three maritime containers (40 footers) can be transloaded into two domestic containers (53 footers) and then loaded on a freight train. This has the notable advantage of reducing domestic transportation costs since rail companies charge about the same rate for 40 and 53 footers. This also prevents long distance movements of maritime empty containers. The "synergy" between the port and and the inland terminal of such a concept creates a new type of maritime / land interface which essentially results in a regionalized port.

Note: The term "Agile Port" has been used, mainly by consultants, to characterize the cluster of a port terminal and an inland rail terminal. We find the term inappropriate as it confers merits (being agile) to a concept that has not yet been proven; there are different levels of agility. Under such circumstances, a term that describes the function of the system is more appropriate, such as Port / Inland rail terminal cluster.